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This chapter offers an ethnography of the dynamic relationship between state agencies and local communities. I blend an interest in “studying up”—examining how state agencies interpret their mandate for safeguarding heritage—with “studying down”—exploring how local actors on the ground process the pre- and post-inscription realities...

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"We Know What Our Folk Culture is From Cassettes and Videos:" Rethinking the Popular-Folk Dynamic in the Indian Himalayas. In Music and Dance in Everyday South Asia (Z. Sherinian and S. Morelli, eds.), 2024.

The concept of “folk” typically brings to mind an older way of life, one that emphasizes community and continuity. Usually not far behind is the idea that folk culture is in decline, or surviving at the margins of a globalizing popular culture that slowly cannibalizes it. In Sanskrit-derived languages in South Asia...

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Listening to popular music is a central means by which people construct their place in the world, both literally and figuratively. For Garhwalis living inside and outside of the Himalayas, listening to vernacular popular music has...

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 It would be fair to say that film has provided one of the most influential platforms for the reification and dissemination of ideas about regional identity and folk style in postcolonial India. What is often overlooked in Indian film studies, however, is the degree to which mainstream film productions adapt elements of regional folk style from small-scale, vernacular film and music productions, and vice versa...

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In this chapter, I highlight three periods in which there has been a shift in the meaning and treatment of folk in musical and social discourse. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, colonial administrators and academics studied folklore as a means of positioning rural India and hereditary, low-caste communities as primitive subjects within an evolutionary paradigm. In the mid-twentieth century...

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This chapter offers an ethnographic account of a single Garhwali album

being produced within a Delhi studio. The recording studio is a unique

ethnographic space: It is bland, without windows, and completely unlike

the kinds of spaces in which consumers will listen to the music created in

it. Ethnographies of the recording studio...

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While the role of All India Radio in shaping the national musical canon is well known, this article examines AIR's role in codifying and institutionalizing regional folk music, with particular focus on the Uttarakhand Himalayas. Between 1955 and 1978, hereditary...

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As regionalism has become a politically and economically advantageous policy across much of Asia, vernacular popular music has concomitantly become an important arena for articulating and codifying shared regionalist sentiment. This article explores the reasons for the emergence of subnational regionalism within within post-independence India, and its more recent...

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This article ethnographically traces processes of musical feedback and influence between the urban recording studio and the rural festival, thereby complicating the routine dichotomization of musical life into categories of indigenous/cosmopolitan, traditional/modern, or production/consumption.

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Since the central Himalayan regional state of Uttarakhand was first formed in North India in 2000, commercial alums of spirit and god (devta) possession ceremonies (jagar) have steadily increased in number and popularity. This growth is partly a result of regionalist cultural and political movement that has sought to emphasize the distinct ritual practices of popular Hinduism...

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